If I were to point to the opposite of what that is, try being a guard in Arelith. Nobody cares because the consequences are not able to be severe beyond 24/7 coordinated killbash with your skype buddies where they set the gank timer for 24 hours.
Yeah, that's really not true. If you don't obey the PC Guards, they can legitimately mechanically bar you from entering their city. You cannot physically enter the city anymore without some serious creativity. The transition is locked and you cant re enter the city without petitioning to have your ban lifted and answering for your crimes.
I dont actually think that's the answer, but the consequences are severe. You mechanically lose out on not only a portion of the community but any factions or roleplay themes that are represented by those areas.
Personally I think ganks are horrible for our community, but that's not really the topic. I did mention ganking, but I wasn't suggesting we remove the possibility in this thread. I was suggesting that if bounty hunters want to go and gank others, there should be an investment cost of taking the effort to communicate bounties with the Vallaki Guard through some form of IC means PRIOR to the ganking itself.
But the focus of this thread is the means of which how bounties are communicated. My suggestions were only slightly on topic as it was :p
Not to tilt my hand here too much, but numerous player characters who have run afoul of the Barovian Garda, in whichever jurisdiction they happened to mis-step in, have taken the (appropriate) action of preserving their existence by finding asylum in other countries that simply do not care about Barovia's legal system. Most frequently, these wayward souls find themselves in Dementlieu. Yes, it's true -- Once you've made the mistake of strong-arming a Guard-faction PC, there are consequences. The prevailing theme of this server is that you, even when Native (though generally, Barovians aren't the ones wanted by the Garda, except in a few rare exceptions) that the forces around you are inherently oppressive, bigger than you, stronger than you, and you're just trying to survive. Whether you like it or not, they are the State. Whether that's the Gendarmes, or the Garda, and if you run afoul of the State, you are in some serious trouble. Of course, I imagine this is more of an inconvenience for players/characters who either..
A) Don't have a strong IC social group yet
or
B) Are still concerned about leveling up expeditiously, and want to be able to safely and without-worry, adventure with randoms sets of adventurers without the concern that Tim the Rogue might abscond with your body when you die at Curst.
In which case, I have to readily admit that it my character barely even leaves Port-a-Lucine, and I've mostly leveled off of RP XP. The trick is, you have to find something you actually care to talk about, that keeps you busy, frequently and often. Sitting around a campfire dropping one-liner's, while it nets you XP, it's intermittent at best and doesn't accurately reflect the potential of the RP XP System. Coming from someone who regularly can type out 100 WPM paragraphs with a currently malfunctioning mechanical keyboard, the biggest challenge for me has always been finding ways to keep busy in plot. Fortunately, Dementlieu has no shortage of tableside conversations, backroom plotting, scheming, drinking and general conversation.
If we argue the shoe is on the other foot, and you managed to earn the ire of the Gendarmerie Nationale and you're a level 14+ who's irritated the mid-high level hub of the server for a bounty far exceeding the amount a general barovian bounty equals to -- I'll say from personal experience, that the amount of effort you have to actively put in to legitimately acquire a bounty of any substantial amount in Dementlieu, is literally asking for it to happen as consequence, or you're shirking a summons. Dementlieu is inherently a vastly wealthy nation, so their bounties tend to fetch a bit more and as a result, we tend to be more careful about slapping down bounties from a player perspective knowing full-well that the prices they are generally posted at are enough to sway a lot of characters on the server.
Barovia, it's very easy just to get the wrong side of the stick sometimes, however, the Garda players exist to enforce the setting. And sometimes, especially considering the nature of Barovia in general, that means risking getting a random 5k bounty for casting some magic and giving a spooked Garda a rude hand gesture before running away.
PoTM is not designed in such a way to support an infrastructure of cohesive messageboards and notices to be posted everywhere the Garda/Gendarme player might announce their bounty. It's safe to say that it these organizations have NPCs in the background who handle that bulk workload for them, and in Dementlieu, the Gendarmes directly have usage of the City Press. Either an entire new messageboard system would have to be designed, and then you'd have to walk around and post a notice on each messageboard, and then post it to each town in Barovia that there's a warrant for Tim the Rogue in Vallaki, you're literally just moving the forums to an item in the game. Move an NPC to stand beside that board, you suddenly require DM oversight to try to deface it, which then slows the pace of defacing/molesting the notices and basically ends in the same result as the forums are currently.
If you just leave papers on the ground, those are removed with each reset. As some have noted in the past in discussions elsewhere, this server's reset cycle can be a fickle mistress. It crashes, it gets voted to reset, a DM will reset it for kicks and gigs whenever it's running too slow. Sometimes it's up for three days, sometimes it crashes four times a day. Either way, that would result in Guard players simply spending almost all of their time hanging up posters, when they often have subordinates/npcs who could and should be handling that duty for them, so that they can represent the interactive face of the faction with the rest of the player-base. The thrill of the gimmick will get very old, for the Guard player within a month at most, and eventually, it'll just be a chore.
Guard faction roleplay is already enough like a job, considering every time someone in the Outskirts or in Port-a-Lucine decides they want to have a special moment in the limelight, two or three reports are generally typed out on a forum accompanying the long roleplay and process of handling the criminal. For Gendarmes, if we have to deal with you, typically there's a report in the standard logs, if necessary, a report in the Officer's Logs, and if you have been fined, a report in the Fines Logs, and if you've been arrested AND fined, there'll be a report in the Prison Roster, and the Fines Logs. If you're an Officer, and you're doing your job as an Officer, you also may begin then leaving additional posts into your subordinates' logs so that they can involve themselves in any ongoing investigations or probationary sanctions surrounding this criminal, after the fact. And if anyone has to be summoned as witnesses, or the perp escaped, or had friends involved, there's additional announcement posts to be made. And that's all because Tim the Rogue decided to pickpocket Frank Fighterstein and Frank hauled off and PvP'd on him when he caught Tim's dastardly little fingers in his pants.
tl;dr, we have enough paperwork to go through. It'd seriously just burn out any dedicated Guard player to have to manually fiddle with posting posters on walls declaring Tim the Rogue is Wanted. These are large organizations, and frankly, larger than any organization the player alone could muster to tear down notices. They may be posted in bars, they may be posted on noticeboards, on the back of a door in a latrine; It's up to your character how he runs across the spaghetti western wanted notice with the face of Tim the Rogue on it. Those things travel, and dozens, if not hundreds of NPCs back-up the infrastructure that supports their distribution. The realistic effect of you, or even you and five of your best friends ripping down posters in the City has is just a drop in the water compared to the Government Clerks that walk around PaL and plasters warrants to the walls, or the Garda Recruit NPC, or servant, that nails notices to doors and boards, every day/night cycle, because it's their job. In-fact, if you look around on some of the walls in the City in PaL, there's random posters for Gearling's Firearms and even random 'WANTED!' posters graphically represented on the wall about some smuggling ship and her crew.